It was difficult. He was reminded, in the space of a few minutes listening to Whitehead 
talk, of how much subtler things were on the outside. By comparison with this man's 
shifting, richly inflected talk the cleverest conversationalist in Wandsworth was an 
amateur. Toy slipped a second large whisky into Marty's hand, but he scarcely noticed. 
Whitehead's voice was hypnotic; and strangely soothing.
    "Toy has explained your duties to you, has he?" "Yes, I think so." "I want you to 
make this house your home, Strauss. Become familiar with it. There are one or two places 
that will be out-of-bounds to you; Toy will tell you where. Please observe those 
constraints. The rest of the place is at your disposal." Marty nodded, and downed his 
whisky; it ran down his gullet like quicksilver.
    "Tomorrow . . ." Whitehead stood up, the thought unfinished, and returned to the 
window. The grass shone as though freshly painted.
    ". . . we'll take a walk around the place, you and I." "Fine." "See what's to be 
seen. Introduce you to Bella, and the others." There was more staff? Toy hadn't mentioned 
them; but inevitably there would be others here: guards, cooks, gardeners. The place 
probably swarmed with functionaries.
    "Come talk to me tomorrow, eh?" Marty drained the rest of his scotch and Toy gestured 
that he should stand up. Whitehead seemed suddenly to have lost interest in them both. 
His assessment was over, at least for today; his thoughts were already elsewhere, his 
stare directed out of the window at the gleaming lawn.
    "Yes, sir. Tomorrow." "But before you come-" Whitehead said, glancing around at Marty.
    "Yes, sir." "Shave off your mustache. Anybody would think you'd got something to 
hide."
    
    12
    Toy gave Marty a perfunctory tour of the house before taking him upstairs, promising 
a more thorough walkabout when time wasn't so pressing. Then he delivered Marty to a 
long, airy room on the top story, and at the side of the house.
    "This is yours," he said. Luther had left the suitcase and the plastic bag on the 
bed; their tattiness looked out of place in the sleek utility of the room. It had, like 
the study, contemporary fittings.
    "It's a bit bare at the moment," said Toy. "So do whatever you want with it. If 
you've got photographs-" "Not really." "Well, we ought to get something on the walls. 
There are some books"-he nodded to the far end of the room, where several shelves groaned 
under a weight of volumes-"but the library downstairs is at your disposal. I'll show you 
the layout sometime next week, when you've settled in. There's a video up here, too, and 
another downstairs. Again, Joe doesn't really have much interest in it, so help 
yourself." "Sounds good." "There's a small dressing room through to the left. As Joe 
said, you'll find some fresh clothes in there. Your bathroom is through the other door. 
Shower and so on. And I think that's it. I hope it's adequate." "It's fine," Marty said. 
Toy glanced at his watch and turned to leave.
    "Just before you go . . ." "Problem?" "No problem," Marty said. "Jesus, no problem at 
all. I just want you to know I'm grateful-" "No need." "But I am," Marty insisted; he'd 
been trying to find a cue for this speech since Trinity Road. "I'm very grateful. I don't 
know how or why you chose me-but I appreciate it." Toy was mildly discomforted by this 
show of feeling, but Marty was glad to have it said.
    "Believe me, Marty. I wouldn't have chosen you if I didn't think you could do the 
job. You're here now. It's up to you to make the best of it. I'm going to be around, of 
course, but after this you're more or less your own man." "Yes. I realize that." "I'll 
leave you then. See you at the beginning of the week. Pearl's left food out for you in 
the kitchen, by the way. Goodnight." "Goodnight." Toy left him alone. He sat down on the 
bed and opened his suitcase. The badly packed clothes smelled of prison detergent, and he 
didn't want to take them out. Instead he dug down to the bottom of the case until his 
hands found his razor and shaving foam. Then he undressed, slung his stale clothes on the 
floor, and went into the bathroom.
    It was spacious, mirrored, and seductively lit. Freshly laundered towels hung on a 
heated rack. There was a shower as well as a bath and a bidet: an embarrassment of 
waterworks. Whatever else happened to him here, he'd be clean. He switched on the mirror 
light and set the shaving implements down on the glass shelf above the sink. He needn't 
have bothered with his search. Toy, or perhaps Luther, had laid a complete shaving kit 
out for him; razor, preshave, foam, cologne. All unopened, pristine: waiting for him. He 
looked at himself in the mirror-that intimate self-scrutiny which was expected of women 
but which men seldom practiced except in locked bathrooms. The anxieties of the day 
showed on his face: his skin was anemic, and the bags under his eyes full. Like a man 
searching for some treasure, he plundered his face for clues. Was his past written here, 
he wondered, in all its grubby detail; etched, perhaps, too deeply to be erased?
    He needed some sun, no doubt of that, and decent exercise out in the open air. From 
tomorrow, he thought, a new regime. He'd run every day till he was so fit he was 
unrecognizable. Get himself to a proper dentist too. His gums bled worryingly often, and 
in one or two places they were receding from the tooth. He was proud of his teeth: they 
were even and strong, like his mother's. He tried his smile on the mirror, but it had 
lost some of its former sparkle. He'd have to exercise that too. He was in the big wide 
world again; and maybe in time there'd be women to woo with that smile.
    His surveillance shifted from face to body. A wedge of fat was sitting on the muscle 
of his abdomen: he was easily a stone overweight. He'd have to work at that. Watch his 
diet, and keep the exercise up until he was back to the twelve stone three he'd been when 
he first went to Wandsworth. The extra weight apart, he felt quite good about himself. 
Maybe the warm light flattered him, but prison didn't seem to have changed him radically. 
He still had all his hair; he wasn't scarred-except for the tattoos, and a small crescent 
to the left of his mouth; he wasn't doped up to the eyeballs. Maybe he was a survivor 
after all.
    His hand had crept to his groin as he perused himself, and he'd idly teased himself 
semierect. He hadn't been thinking of Charmaine. If there was any lust in his arousal it 
was narcissistic. Many of the cons he'd lived with had found it easy to slake their 
sexual thirst with their cellmates, but Marty had never been comfortable with the idea. 
Not simply out of distaste for the acts-though he felt that acutely-but because that 
unnaturalness was forced upon him. It was just another way that prison humiliated a man. 
Instead, he'd locked his sexuality away, and used his cock for pissing and little else. 
Now, toying with it like a vain adolescent, he wondered if he could still use the damn 
thing.
    He ran the shower lukewarm and stepped in, slicking himself down from head to foot 
with lemon-scented soap. In a day of pleasures this was perhaps the best. The water was 
stimulating, like standing in a spring rain. His body began to wake. Yes, that was it, he 
thought: I've been dead, and I'm coming back to life. He'd been buried in the asshole of 
the world, a hole so deep he thought he'd never scramble out of it, but he had, damn it. 
He was out. He rinsed, and then indulged himself with a repeat of the ritual, this time 
running the water considerably hotter and harder. The bathroom filled with steam and the 
slap of the water on the shower tiles.
    When he stepped out and turned the flow off, his head buzzed with heat, whisky and 
fatigue. He moved to the mirror and cleared an oval in the condensation with the ball of